Stephen Burt

David Mikics

John and Rebecca Moores Professor of English David Mikics

Professor of English and American Literature and Language Stephen Burt, Frmets Frm Frm

Collects one hundred sonnets and commentaries that highlight the history of the sonnet.

The Art of the Sonnet

"The Romance of Individualism in Emerson and Nietzsche examines the argument, as well as the affinity, between these two philosophers. Nietzsche was an enthusiastic reader of Emerson and inherited from him an interest in provocation as a means of instruction, an understanding of the permanent importance of moods and transitory moments in our lives, and a sense of the revolutionary character of impulse. Both were deliberately outrageous thinkers, striving to shake us out of our complacency.".

The Romance of Individualism in Emerson and Nietzsche

"This book argues that critical tradition has obscured the mutually constitutive relation between the didactic mission of Renaissance epic and the pathos of the epic self." "Critics usually see Spenser and Milton either as poets dedicated to an autonomous aesthetic that dictates indulgence in pathos for its own sake, or as Christian moralists who subordinate pathos to the didactic demands of society. The Romantic tradition that stretches from Keats to Harold Bloom exemplifies the former option. Neo-Christian, reader response, and new historicist critics assert a contrary, but similarly unbalanced, view by choosing the didactic authority of social custom, tradition, or ideology over the pathos of subjectivity." "Resisting attempts to establish an absolute priority for either pathos or moralizing, David Mikics looks to the debate between subjective passions and didactic imperatives as a sign of the complex relation between literary creation and social norms. In a study that shies away from new historicist endorsements of the force of normative ideology, as well as late Romantic celebrations of the poetic self, the author finds that Spenser and Milton develop an innovative literary subjectivity under the pressure of the Reformation's moralizing aims." "Incorporating moral force within pathos would allow poetic passion to become a worthy and clearly justifiable public stance. But Spenser and Milton, in their pursuit of this rhetorical ideal, find themselves acknowledging, instead, an enduring disjunction between affect and the discursive forms of public morality which aim to discipline or exploit it."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

John and Rebecca Moores Professor of English David Mikics

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